Barefoot Beach Read Online Free Page B

“Irish, Dutch, same continent.”
    â€œâ€˜Skin: light. Hair: dark blond. Eyes: Hazel. Religion: Protestantslash agnostic.’ Whatever that means.” As a cafeteria Catholic, who was I to judge?
    Lon read over my shoulder, “‘Likes hiking and fishing.’ That’s a match. ‘Enjoys Beethoven.’ A man of good taste. Bonus: he’s a medical student, on his way to a noble profession, unlike mine. And he’s an Open ID Donor. That means when the kid’s eighteen, number 1659’s willing to meet with the product of his . . . uh . . . ten minutes with a
Penthouse
magazine in a small white room.”
    â€œYou’re okay with that? The meeting part?” I wasn’t sure how I felt about laying out the welcome mat for some nameless number who liked Beethoven.
    But Lon was. “Absolutely. Everyone has the right to know where they come from. If our child is interested, I’ll invite the guy over for a beer. We’ll do some backslapping and I’ll brag about how well John London Farrell or Maureen London Farrell turned out.”
    â€œLet’s call him Jack. It’s a strong name. But Maureen
Quinn
Farrell, please,” I said. “I’m a person too.”
    â€œThat you are, Nora Farrell née Quinn,” he said. “And a fine figure of a lass, indeed.”
    I reached for his hand. It was warm and I brushed the back of it with my lips. “You really think this will work out?”
    His fingers unfolded to stroke my cheek. “Yup, it’s going to be good,” Lon said.
    And he was right; it was very good. For quite some time. Until something or someone screwed with the magic, and it wasn’t.

chapter three

    Jack’s car pulled in at three twenty-six a.m. I knew the time precisely because at the sound of the garage door grinding up, I roused from a restless half sleep to check the neon green numbers on my bedside clock. I heard the garage door go down, an assortment of thumps and creaks, then Jack’s tread mounting the stairs. For the child of a dancer, he was not light on his feet.
Clump, clump, clump.
On that reassuring music, I floated off until dawn.
    In the new light, I peeked in his room, and, frankly, I didn’t like the look of him. His normally ruddy complexion was washed out. He was curled on his bed in jeans and an old golf shirt of Lon’s, probably the same clothes he’d worn on the drive. His fists were clenched, and his eyelids, fringed with thick blond lashes, twitched. He’d propped his iPhone on the pillow next to him so I figured he was waiting or hoping for a morning call from Tiffanie, the sophomore, the older woman, the mean-mouthed girl. Even in the sexy-pouty, too-much-cleavage-revealed glamour shot he’d passed around at Christmas, she’d looked narrow and pinched. The camera didn’t lie and Photoshop couldn’t blur her essential skinniness. The picture told the story: there wasn’t enough of her to share.
    She’d been jerking Jack around since February and had administered the coup de grace during finals week. Finals week! How cold was that? My nineteen-year-old, in the throes of first crazy love, accent on thecrazy, had decided to stay on at Duke for an extra month to try to salvage the relationship while Tiffanie started summer school. I wondered how that had turned out.
    The room was cold, over-air-conditioned, thanks to Jack’s heavy hand with the thermostat. I pulled the top sheet up to cover him. Even that light touch caused him to stir. He flinched and turned his head so his cheek rested smack on the iPhone. Not a good move.
    I smiled at a memory. When Jack was eight, he and Lon had worked together over a two-week stretch of August twilights to build a model of the Wright Brothers’ first flier. It turned out to be a delicate wonder of struts and strings that set off a frenzy of high-fiving between them. Exactly how it happened